Cats in May (16 page)

We discovered what it was eventually. We had the minute hand on upside-down. A discovery that so delighted us we forgot the vicissitudes we’d gone through to get one simple weight running on one simple piece of catgut and went round boasting of our prowess in mending clocks. Which was why, when Grandma broke the hand on her alarm clock a week or two later, she asked us, as experts, to put it right.

What we did to our own clock was, as Charles remarked only the other day, nothing to what we did to Grandma’s. Quite by accident, of course. The clock had no glass in it to begin with—that had got broken one morning when the clock went off too early for Grandma’s liking and she had swept it on to the floor. The hand had snapped off another morning when she put the clock under the bedclothes to muffle it and it caught in the blankets. All it needed, as Charles
assured her, was a touch of solder and it would be as good as new.

The trouble there was that we weren’t very expert with solder. At least four times we got the hand on—success at last! said Charles each time we did it—only to find we’d soldered it to the other one and they both went round together. And when at last we did get it on by itself we discovered that during our endeavours the clock face—the little circle round the hands—had been badly scorched by the soldering iron.

We painted that—or rather Charles did, being the artist of the family—with aluminium paint. Which made the rest of the clock face look shabby, so he painted that green. Only to discover that, in his enthusiasm, he’d painted over the numbers—so when the green paint was dry he put those in again in red. At which stage, putting in the figure twelve, he unfortunately touched the minute hand with his brush and, being very lightly soldered, it fell off again. And by the time we’d soldered it on once more the aluminiumpainted circle behind it was not only scorched. The heat had cracked the paint …

Charles was for starting all over again, but I was
feeling slightly cracked myself by that time. We gave it back to Grandma as it was. The hand, as I pointed out before she had a chance to say anything, was at any rate
on
.

Actually Grandma was too stunned to pass much comment. Yes, she said, gazing disbelievingly at her chameleon-like alarm clock, it was.

Fourteen
Right up the Pole

Spring arrived in the valley at the end of March. It needed experts to detect it, mind you. Charles still had a cough. Sidney still clung firmly to his muffler. Father Adams still clumped past the cottage every morning in a balaclava that made him deafer than ever—to protect, as we heard him informing the Rector at the top of the hill one day, his lug’oles from the frost.

But the cats knew it had come. Only a week before we had had snow, and it had been the easiest thing in the world to find them in the mornings. A small, neat
line of tracks leading straight from the back door to the nearest cloche—that was Sheba. Ears down, coat stuck up like a parka, a quick dig in the early peas and in again.

A trail that wound deeply through the wastes like a traveller lost in the Antarctic—pausing to inspect a bush, digressing to look in the greenhouse, ambling haphazardly up the drive and ending at a frozen puddle—that, on the other hand, was Solomon. Sitting interestedly on the ice and listening to it crack.

We had, when we got them in again, had the usual protest meeting over the bird table—with, outside, little wrens and blue tits gratefully fluttering in the snow, and, inside, Solomon and Sheba shouting battle songs in the window. We had also witnessed an incident which Charles said sometimes came to nature lovers like us as a reward for diligence and patience.

One morning the cats, in the middle of raucous advice to the birds as to what they’d do if
they
laid hands on them—and it wouldn’t, bawled Solomon, with his eye on his old enemy the blackbird, include giving him bacon rind either—had suddenly gone quiet. Going in to see what was wrong, on the principle that silence in
a Siamese household always means trouble—there, sure enough, was Sheba hiding behind the curtain, Solomon visible only as two ears stuck periscope-fashion above the windowsill, and magpies staging a raid outside.

Back and forwards they were going, the great black-and-white wings flashing so fast between the bird table and the woods that, as Solomon said in a small, un-Solomon-like voice from beneath the sill, there must be hundreds of them out there, and it was a jolly good thing we were in. As a matter of fact, which was the interesting thing about it, there were only two. Working, according to Charles, who understands these things, to a plan of Time and Motion. One chasing off the other birds and piling the cake over by the gate and the other—the girl she bet, said Sheba from behind her curtain; it was always the girls who did the work and the other one looked a lazypants to her, like Solomon—busily transporting it from the gate into the woods.

But now, quite suddenly, it was spring. With Sheba sitting on the cottage roof and refusing to come down—she could, she said, see every mouse hole for miles around and the air was fine up here—Solomon chasing
a ginger tom, and Timothy arriving for the Easter holidays.

We weren’t quite out of the woods yet, mind you. That night, looking for two little cats who had elected to stay out Both Ends of the Day now that spring was here, we met the ginger tom chasing Solomon. While Timothy—presumably to keep his lug’holes warm too—was now wearing a crash helmet.

It added, as Charles remarked, little to the decor of the cottage or to Timothy, but he refused to take it off. He also, having once renewed his acquaintance with Solomon and with us, hardly ever seemed to go home. We had Sheba on the wall busily informing people he Wasn’t Ours, Solomon stalking admiringly after him being a space cat, Timothy himself performing landings on the lawn from Mars … Wunnerful how the little chap’d took to us, wasn’t it? said Father Adams, beaming benignly over the gate at the mêlée on his way to the Rose and Crown—which was all very well for him.

People didn’t tell him
his
little boy’s trousers were coming down. People didn’t tell him
his
little boy was calling them rude names in the lane, or encouraging a
cat with a long black face to walk deliberately over their cars. People didn’t tell him they thought that helmet was bad for
his
little boy’s ears—to be met by the little boy retching realistically and sticking out his tongue. Everybody thought he was ours.

It wouldn’t have been so bad if he appreciated the relationship, but he didn’t. He followed Charles around informing him scathingly that he couldn’t grow cabbages like his granfer. Me he advised professionally that my rake was no good. Break he I would if Charlie-boy didn’t put a nail in h’n, he said. And when a little later the rake did indeed come off the handle and I tried to slink nonchalantly past with it hidden in a bucket—did Timothy avert his gaze and ignore it like a gentleman? Like heck he did. Told I, didn’t he? he said.

His one saving grace was his interest in nature, and even that had complications. Because when I pointed out the birds to him, and Charles told him about them making their nests—and then Charles, in an unguarded moment, told him of the collection of birds’ eggs he had had as a boy—we had fresh problems with Timothy. He wanted a collection too.

In vain I tried to persuade him against it. All he said, while Charles looked suitably guilty, was that Charlie-boy did. The best I could do, as the die was cast, was to stipulate sternly that he must never damage a nest, never frighten the bird, never take more than one egg—and then only if there were at least three there already. And only, in any case, I said firmly, if he was going to be a Naturalist.

He was, he assured us. On a business basis, apparently, because next time I asked after his collection he said he had six hedgesparrow’s eggs already. Only one from each nest, he assured me as I clutched my head and groaned. But there were lots of them about, ’n’ if he swapped one with somebody who had, say, a spare moorhen’s egg, that would save him disturbing a moorhen, wouldn’t it?

It would also, I hoped, giving the scheme my dubious blessing, stop Timothy from falling in the pond—which was something Charles, nostalgically remembering his own childhood, hadn’t thought of.

As it was, spurred on by a book on birds which he’d persuaded Father Adams to buy for him, the next development was that Timothy started borrowing our stepladder to look at nests he’d spotted up the lane or in the woods, which meant that Charles or I—accompanied, of course, by Solomon and, in the far, reproachful distance, Sheba—had to go with him to hold the ladder and prevent him breaking his neck.

That in itself wasn’t too bad. It was all quite local—concentrated round a corner of the village where everybody thought we were nuts anyway. But one day Timothy turned up in a state of great excitement announcing that he’d found a hawfinch’s nest. Over by the church, he said it was, in a rather tall hawthorn, which meant taking the ladder—and, as the branches were prickly, please could he borrow the shears?

We all went on that expedition. I got roped in—hawthorns being rather tricky—to help hold the ladder. I didn’t mind that so much, but I did experience a
qualm when we reached the church to find that Timothy had told us a little lie. That it wasn’t, he explained,
quite
right here after all, but some way down the lane.

I guessed what lay ahead of me, and I was right. A procession down the road with me trying to look as if I always went for walks carrying the rear ends of ladders. Timothy wearing his crash helmet. The cats marching happily behind. People, as I pointed out, were looking at us even then—but it was no good telling Charles. He, re-living the halcyon days of youth, was a Naturalist too by this time. ‘Take no notice,’ he said.

So there—when we reached the tree and my final fears were realised; it was not in some corner of a hidden copse but hanging right over the road—I stood. Holding the ladder while Charles pruned out the branches, Timothy directed operations from the sideline, and the cats sat conspicuously on top.

Just about everybody passed us while we were there. The doctor laughing his head off, old ladies raising their eyebrows, Sidney tapping his head. What they’d be saying about us in the village I could just imagine, but it didn’t worry Charles. Not, that was, until he came down out of the tree—there was nothing in
the nest and it was, once more, a hedgesparrow’s—and heard what Timothy had to say. He’d just remembered, he announced. Rector’d given he a talking-to yesterday about birds’-nesting. Did we think we should go back across the fields with the ladder—so nobody’d know we’d been? he said.

Spring, in spite of that little setback, still surged steadfastly on. Starlings started nesting in the eaves and Solomon, trying to climb a wall to see them, fell down and hurt his foot. I made some dandelion wine, which attracted all the ants in the neighbourhood who immediately started getting drunk in the greenhouse. The Rector’s cats got spring eczema and were going round self-consciously painted with Gentian Violet which scared our two practically out of their points when they saw them. They thought it was Woad, they said.